NAOMI RINCÓN GALLARDO
“Home
is where my
art beats”
#ARTS-BASED RESEARCH #COMMONS #INSTALLATION #MULTIMEDIA #IDENTITY #NEO-COLONIAL #VIDEO #GENDER
BIO. Naomi Rincón Gallardo (1979) is a visual artist/researcher currently living and working in Mexico City. Her mythical/political fabulations address the creation of counter-worlds in neo-colonial settings. From a cuir/decolonial perspective she integrates her interests in speculative fiction, theater games, music videos and vernacular festivities and crafts. Alongside her artistic work, she has been involved in institutional and non-institutional educational settings and community projects, both teaching and coordinating. She completed her PhD degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently supported as a Miembro del Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte 2019.
Photo: © Naomi Rincón Gallardo
The Formaldehyde Trip (2017)
Video/Performance
The Formaldehyde Trip imagines murdered Mixtec environmental activist, Bety Cariño (1973-2010) in her politically-surrealist trans-temporal journey through the underworld, where she finds pluriversal companions formed by Mesoamerican deities, witches and animals who joinher and care for her in order to make her legacy proliferate. Her journey is a process of becoming Coyolxauhqui, the Mexico, goddess of moon who embodies the powers of nighttime and who, according to Gloria Anzaldúa, has the faculty to recover from severe harm by putting her fragmented body together again –a faculty that Anzaldúa came to call Coyolxauhqui imperative - an axolotl preserved in formaldehyde plays the role of a story teller, a native educated guide, the object of desire/research of Alexander Von Humboldt, a multiplied dildo, a healing capsule, and a ghostly creature who travels through historical and contemporary forms of extractivism.
Heavy Blood (2018)
Video
The devastated landscape of an open-pit mine in Vetagrande Zacatecas hosts ghostly creatures designing obstacles against progress. A miner and a phone sex worker’s proletarian lungs work under the demand of affective and mechanic performances for labor and pleasure. A disoriented extinct hummingbird looks for the nectar of flowers in a mining area, dwelling among crushed rocks and corrosive air. A lady with copper teeth that resembles Nahua destructive deity Tlantepuzilama, roars her non-human laments inside a cave. A gang of Mesoamerican voracious vagina-dentata-like creatures enjoy themselves and fulfill their toxic cravings, ingesting politics of inequality. Unwanted and desiring, they are trained for survival under harsh circumstances. But they want something more than survival. They want to play loud, they want to play too hard, in ecstasy.
Opossum Resilience (2019)
Video
Opossum Resilience is inspired on a series of encounters and an interview I had with a Zapotec female land defender, for whom I use the pseudonym Lady Reed in order to conceal her real name. This place-based fabulation grounded in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, bastardizes Mesoamerican myths around four figures: a Hill, an Agave, an Opossum and Lady Reed. Lady Reed is a mythical Mixtec character who helps the opossum to cut the agave leaves in order to get its sugary alcoholic sap. Opossum Resilience overlaps the time of creation with a contemporary socio-environmental conflict around the imposition of a mining project in an Indigenous Territory. This third part of the trilogy summons the powers of festivity and inebriation; and imagines an opossum providing an activist with the mythical powers to play dead and then revive.